By Mumia Abu-Jamal from death row
What half the world wants
On March 8, 2004, women around the world--in
Los Angeles, England, Argentina, Uganda, Peru, Philadelphia,
San Francisco, in Guyana, in southern India, in Trinidad and
Tobago, in Spain--will be staging the Fifth Global Women's
Strike, a movement involving women in some 60 countries, many
involved in grassroots organizations, fighting for payment for
housework; for clean, safe water resources; for housing,
education, gender justice, and peace.
In a world where war is now our norm, the Global Women's
Strike is part of the vast throng against war and
occupation--not only in Iraq, but in Palestine, in Colombia, in
the Congo, and in Kashmir.
Their organizing slogan ... is deceptively simple: "Invest
in Caring Not Killing."
Although the movement had its beginning years ago in the
"Pay for Housework" movement in England, it has grown
considerably into a worldwide, anti-racist and anti-war
movement.
The movement recognizes the basic inequality built into the
capitalist economic system--the class, racial, and gender-based
exploitation underlying it all.
Women's issues differ from nation to nation, and between
classes in the same nation; yet there are also similarities in
the fundamentals underlying those differences.
Marxist feminist Selma James, in her influential 1973
pamphlet "Sex, Race and Class" (London: Housewives in Dialogue,
1986 repr.), writes:
"Housewives are involved in the production and what is the
same thing-- reproduction of workers, what Marx calls 'labor
power.' They service those who are daily destroyed by working
for wages and who need to be daily renewed; and they care for
and discipline those who are being prepared to work when they
grow up." (pp.2-3)
At base, James argues, because women's work performs such a
critical role in capital's production, it should receive a
commensurate return.
In Kampala, Uganda, the Kaabong Women's Organiz ation is
concerned not with war in a distant land but war at home, in
Uganda, for the past 17 years. Their demand is not just for
peace, but for land; and for water; for there, as in much in
the rest of the world, agriculture rests on the backs of
billions of women. ...
"Invest in Caring, not Killing..." Hmmm ... What a
concept!
Column written Feb. 26, 2004
Reprinted from the April 29, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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